Haiti is currently facing its first cholera outbreak in a hundred years. It’s not a surprise, exactly. It was something public health experts have been afraid of since the earthquake. But after nine months, we were starting to hope maybe it wouldn’t happen.

So far, we haven’t seen a international water war. We’ve been able to solve water conflicts through economic and diplomatic solutions. I hope - I really hope - that we can keep that up. But as water gets scarcer, the fights are going to get worse.

Robert Evans won the Nobel prize today for his work in developing in-vitro fertilization. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and it doesn’t always work. On the other end of the technology spectrum, in both Afghanistan and Niger, a pregnant woman stands a 1 in 55 chance of dying as a result.

The Millennium Development Goals can’t cover everything. It’s not so much a flaw in the goals as an unfortunate fact of life. One thing they don’t cover is irrigation water. In about ten years, we’re going to regret that.

Maternal health gets a lot of attention. It’s been marked as a priority by donors ranging from the UK Government to the Gates Foundation, and it’s been accepted as one of the areas of global health we actually know how to address.